Friday, January 29, 2016

The Friday Sex Blog [Sexual Peaks]

Today is the last day of what has
turned out to be a marathon prison monitoring visit. We are headed to the super-max, Southport, to conduct a series of one-on-one interviews. I. Am. Tired.

* * *

Sexual
Peaks: Men and Women

Today's
post has to be a quickie (pun intended!).

I
think that by now most of us are familiar with the cliché that knowledge is
power. Clichés are clichés because for the most part they are true. I would
like to spin that cliché a little and
add that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. What I mean by that is that incomplete knowledge is dangerous
because it leads to erroneous conclusions and assumptions.

The
folk wisdom that women reach their sexual peak after age thirty; men during
adolescence is one of those assumptions.

Mind
you, after reading some of the literature, I can’t say I have come to a
definitive conclusion. However, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't question
this assumption. In fact, there are more reasons than not to be suspicious
about this often-cited “fact.”

I
started where everyone should start: I explored the origin of this piece of
accepted wisdom. I was able to trace it to the famous Kinsey surveys of more than
a half century ago. Kinsey, I discovered, came to his conclusion simply by polling
people on the frequency of various sexual behaviors. Based on the number of
times the interviewees reported they had masturbated, had intercourse, or erotic
dreams, Kinsey and his crew surmised that women reached their peaks in their
mid-to-late thirties -- long after men who peaked in late adolescence.

Sexual
peak is not a clear-cut term, however. For example, the number of sexual
experiences per year may be qualitatively different from how much one enjoys
them, and this in turn may be different from how often one thinks about sex, or
how much enjoyment one brings to one's partner. Who is to say which one these
is most relevant to the idea of a “sexual peak” period?

Even
if we were to decide to narrowly define sexual peak to one of mere frequency,
the problem with using the Kinsey-style method is that it is unclear whether
women are said to peak later in life for physiological, psychological, or
social reasons. One possible reason, according to studies on human sexuality,
is that giving birth may help women to become more sexually responsive because
they develop more capillaries (and therefore more “feeling” the reasoning goes)
around the genital area. However, another researcher observed that a crying
baby in the next room may do far more to cool sexual desire than a few more
blood vessels could do to stoke it. In fact, a good number of women report a
loss of sexual desire immediately after giving birth.

One
of the better-known researchers of sexual hormones and their effect on behavior
(and with whom I disagree with in other areas) is John Money. He insists that
how we are conditioned to think about sex is more relevant than how much
estrogen or testosterone we secrete. He observes that while we need a little
amount of hormone to get the system going, additional hormone do not add to the
dynamic. If women enjoy sex more, or simply do it more, at forty than at
twenty, this is probably more a reflection of the time required to break free
from early social conditioning about sexual desire. According to Money, much of
what we see as biological in women is intertwined with the concepts of how
girls are educated sexually (i.e., the “Madonna/ Whore” dichotomy).

Women
are taught to repress their sexuality. They are conditioned to think that if
they experience sexual arousal that they are sluts. Women peaking later may be
a consequence of the time it takes to get over the more than twenty years of early
socialization before they can learn sex can be fun. An even better case against
a biological reason for a later sexual peak is that from an evolutionary point
of view, it makes no sense for women to become interested in sex just as
they're nearing the end of their childbearing years.

If
the issue is socialization, then the gap between men's and women's sexual peak
should narrow (become more alike) as the impact of sexual double standards
lessen. Sure enough, studies since the Kinsey Report are consistently showing
that “women are reaching high levels of sexual arousal at earlier ages.” There
seems to be a leveling out between the sexes these days in terms of
enjoyability and frequency of sex. On the other hand, women are less likely to
report a lusty motive (“I was horny”) until they are in their late thirties.

What
all this points to is that there is a great need for a large national study
that can shed more light on this subject, but politicians are naturally nervous
about such a project and are resistant to allow government agencies to explore
human sexuality. In fact, there are very few large-scale sexual studies these
days.

There
is a more important question regarding the claim that women reach their sexual
peak at a later stage of the life cycle: a peak implies that something drops
off after that milestone. The opposite seems to be true. Women tend to develop
a greater ease and frequency of orgasm with more sexual experience. There is no
evidence of a decline after the so-called peak.

Physiological
changes in men are easier to predict than in women. Most forty year-olds
ejaculate less than fifteen-year-olds, for example. However, the context in
which the arousal takes place counts for much more here. How can one speak
meaningfully about levels of sexual excitement without knowing who is on the
other side of the bed?

More
importantly, the idea that men have passed their sexual peak before their 20s
should raise the question whether a state of a perpetual erection means someone
is at their sexual “peak” in any real sense. The middle-aged man may win the
race in terms of the sexual satisfaction he gives and receives. In fact, a
study of healthy middle-aged to elderly men indicated that while sexual arousal
and activity were indeed lower for older men, sexual enjoyment and satisfaction
did not show a decline with increasing age. Furthermore, masturbation accounts
for the majority of the huge surge early in life for men. That led Kinsey to
talk about men reaching their sexual peak in late adolescence. Is that the measure
of the kind of sexual peak we should be really interested in?

This
much is clear from my own explorations and from personal experience: most men
and women can enjoy sex at any time from puberty until death. Some researchers
have found that some people don't reach their peak until they're in their late
80s! It would appear to me that there is no evidence suggesting that biology is
dominant over social conditioning, psychological conditions, and individual
situations. Which to me means there are no fixed sexual prime years or sexual peak.

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My life experiences have led me to strive to help others move their lives in a positive direction, exploring opportunities that would otherwise be closed to them. I like to think I sit at the crossroads of the dialectic between knowledge and action. I hope that what transpires here is reflective of my beliefs.